Category Archives: Preschool and kindergarten

Your time is your life. Everyone gets 24 hours in a day, yet some people accomplish a great deal more in their day than others. Although, most people rarely think of it this way, ‘time’ is simply another word for ‘life’. This week’s blog helps you with time management. Identify who and what is stealing your time and strategies to track the flow of your day … read more

I had an interesting chat with my car mechanic the other day. He was telling me some funny stories about some of the things people thought were wrong with their car, only to find that they’d accidentally changed some feature of the car or didn’t fully understand what the feature did.

In July, Centre Support made a submission to the Federal Government’s 2014 review of the NQF. The submission included 11 recommendations for changes to the NQF to address issues we have identified directly or through consultation with our customers. It is very pleasing to see that many of our recommendations have been included in the Regulations Impact Statement (RIS) that has been released for public consultation. … read more

I recently read a fantastic article about parents’ ability to correctly assess quality in US children’s services. This article ‘Can consumers detect lemons? An empirical analysis of information asymmetry in the market for child care’ by Naci Mocan makes some very interesting points: parents assess the quality of room and centre characteristics, which may or may not be those that child development professionals think are … read more

Centre Support talks to many services across Australia and some educators are becoming angry about the NQS. It’s not hard to see why. In NSW a service was assessed and their teacher wasn’t recognised, even though the teacher had been a NSW public school kindergarten (first year of school) teacher for the past 30 years. Why was this a problem? The assessor went to teachers’ college … read more

Is the NQS failing? What we see now from ACECQA is not consistent with research. Where is it going wrong? So let’s think critically. Critical thinking is having the ability to question what we are being told. ACECQA tells us everything is okay and the NQS is for the “best possible start in life”. If we were to think critically does this statement hold true? Quality … read more

Is ACECQA’s lack of action to address consistency destroying the NQS? ACECQA says ‘we hear you” but are they really actively listening to what is going on out here in EC? Maybe they don’t want to hear what is really going on. While many of our clients are deservedly achieving ‘exceeding,’ we are also seeing regular inconsistency in other clients’ ratings. For example, there are comments … read more

Let’s get something straight. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A NQF/ NQS LIST/ MANUAL OR BOOK OF EVIDENCES TO MAKE YOU EXCEEDING. That is a NOT TRUE. The NQS is outcome based. So it is about using professional judgement and expertise to make informed decisions about how you meet the standards based on reflection, assessment and improvement, as long as you meet the regulations and … read more

Is it okay to use templates when documenting children’s learning? Yes!!! I am so sick of hearing rubbish like “you can’t get exceeding using a template” or “the program has to be in a scrapbook, or on a computer or IPad.” What a load of childcare whispers! We constantly use templates every day – think about the forms you fill in, the checklists you complete, the … read more

Is your Quality Improvement Plan (QIP) based on a needs approach or a reflective/assessment approach? The introduction of the NQS has led quality improvement across the whole profession. Initially many of us had lots of issues to put in the QIP based on what we were not doing or the elements we weren’t meeting. We often completed our QIP around the ‘catastrophes’ at hand or our imminent … read more

Every service must have the policies required by the regulations but do they? And do the policies actually reflect what educators and staff do? Many educators will tell you they know what is in their policies, but often this is not the case. Do they really believe they know or are they just fibbing? We have regulations to make sure certain standards are achieved and maintained. … read more

What do you say to an assessor who says “show me how this links?” Read on to find out and to clear up the confusion! Several weeks ago Centre Support posted a blog about the “follow-on”. This is a concept that most would associate with our old developmentally appropriate program of the past. “Follow on” referred to the next logical or linear experience that educators would … read more

Since January 2012, many services around the country have undergone assessment and rating. Have two assessment and rating experiences been the same? Probably not. How can they be? Each service is unique in meeting the NQS elements and each assessor assesses differently. Think about how we assess children’s learning. We collect information about the child to assess whether they are meeting the outcome. The assessor does … read more

I hear over and over again from educators the confusion about what is planning and how we do this using the EYLF. In years gone past we would observe a rostered focus child to identify a need, then plan resources for that child to promote development toward that expected milestone -an expected measurement of a child’s physical development set by our Western society. So we were … read more